Cover Story

A Clash of Camelots

Within months of J.F.K.’s death, the president’s widow asked William Manchester to write the authorized account of the assassination. He felt he couldn’t refuse her. Two years later, nearly broken by the task, Manchester found himself fighting a bitter, headline-making battle with Jackie and Bobby Kennedy over the finished book. The author chronicles the toll Manchester’s 1967 best-seller, The Death of a President, exacted—physically, emotionally, and financially—before it all but disappeared.

William Manchester in Hartford in 1962; the photo of J.F.K. behind him was taken by Arnold Newman. Right, Jacqueline Kennedy in 1964. From John Manchester; by George Silk/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

I thought that it would be bound in black and put away on dark library shelves. —Jacqueline Kennedy

It has never gone away, the nightmare of November 22, 1963. Each time one revisits the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, “one hopes for once the story will be different—the car swerves, the bullets miss, and the splendid progress continues. But each time, like a recurrent nightmare, the handsome head is shattered,” as Gore Vidal wrote in his World Journal Tribune review of William Manchester’s highly detailed, passionate, and greatly beleaguered account, The Death of a President.

Of all the books written about the Kennedy assassination—by some counts more than 2,000—the one book commissioned by the Kennedys themselves and meant to stand the test of time has virtually disappeared. The fight over Manchester’s book—published on April 7, 1967, by Harper & Row after more than a year of bitter, relentless, headline-making controversy over the manuscript—nearly destroyed its author and pitted him against two of the most popular and charismatic people in the nation: the slain president’s beautiful grieving widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, and his brother Robert F. Kennedy. And the struggle would bring to both Jackie and Bobby a public-relations nightmare.

A day after the president’s body was flown to Washington, his casket lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda, before final interment in Arlington National Cemetery. Kennedy’s family had wanted the president to be buried in Brookline, Massachusetts, next to his father and to his son Patrick, who had died two days after he was born. But Jacqueline realized that her husband belonged to the American people, and so she insisted on a burial at Arlington.

For two days before the burial, the line of citizens waiting to file by the catafalque reached five miles, snaking through the chill, solemn streets of the capital. For the procession from the Rotunda to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, where the funeral Mass was held, Mrs. Kennedy didn’t want to ride in one of the government’s black Cadillacs, so she walked, leading a delegation from 92 nations. Charles de Gaulle, who towered over the other heads of state as they followed the horse-drawn caisson down Constitution Avenue, later reflected that President Kennedy’s widow “gave the world an example of how to behave.” Manchester later noted that, in the hours after the tragedy, “Jacqueline Kennedy was virtually the government of this country and held it together.” After the assassination, she had stood beside Lyndon B. Johnson in her blood-splattered Chanel suit as he was sworn into office. Now, at the president’s funeral, in her black widow’s garb, she symbolized the nation’s grief. For five years in a row, a Gallup poll named her “the most admired woman in the world.”

Following the ordeal of the funeral, Jacqueline resolved to leave the White House as quickly as possible. Before departing, she had a plaque inscribed with the words “In this room lived John Fitzgerald Kennedy, with his wife Jacqueline, during the two years, ten months, and two days he was president of the United States” and placed it in the Lincoln bedroom. (The Nixons would later have the plaque removed.) Eleven days after the funeral, Jacqueline sought refuge at her temporary home at 3038 N Street, in Georgetown.

Beset by writers clamoring for interviews, Jacqueline decided to designate one to produce the official story of the assassination. In part, she wanted to stop Jim Bishop, a syndicated columnist living in Florida, who was already preparing a book. He was the author of The Day Lincoln Was Shot and a just-finished book, A Day in the Life of President Kennedy, but according to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and special assistant to Kennedy, the First Lady considered Bishop a “hack” who asked too many personal questions. She preferred that no book be written, but as that was impossible, she went in search of an author.

William Manchester was not her first choice. Theodore H. White, a family favorite (The Making of the President 1960), and Walter Lord (A Night to Remember) turned her down. Then Pierre Salinger, the Kennedys’ press secretary, suggested Manchester, a onetime foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun and the author of novels and nonfiction books on H.L. Mencken, the Rockefellers, and President Kennedy.

Most important, he had worshipped John F. Kennedy. His 1962 Portrait of a President was so respectful it was described as “adoring.” Kennedy, not surprisingly, liked Portrait, and Jacqueline had read Manchester’s profile of the president that had appeared in Holiday magazine in 1962. His prose had an emotionally rich, poetic quality that impressed her.

J.F.K. had in fact sat for interviews with Manchester, a not unpleasant experience. “I’d see Jack at the end of his last appointment for the day,” Manchester told the journalist Seymour Hersh. “We’d have a daiquiri and sit on the Truman balcony. He’d smoke a cigar and I’d have a Heineken.”

Duty Calls

Manchester, an ex-Marine, was square-jawed, dark-haired, solidly built. When he first met the president he was 39, Kennedy 44. Both men had been born in Massachusetts, but Manchester’s ancestors, who had settled in Attleboro, had arrived long before the Kennedys. The two men may have bonded over their similar W.W. II experiences. (Both had received Purple Hearts, Manchester fighting on Okinawa, J.F.K. commanding PT 109 in the South Pacific’s Solomon Islands.) Manchester later wrote that the president “was brighter than I was, braver, better-read, handsomer, wittier, and more incisive. The only thing I could do better was write.”

In 1964, Manchester was living in a white 18th-century frame house on High Street in Middletown, Connecticut, with his wife, Judy, and their three children. He was working part-time as a managing editor for American Education Publications and, on a Wesleyan fellowship, was writing a history of the Krupp manufacturing family. On February 5, he was sitting in his office on the second floor of Wesleyan’s Olin Library when he received an early-morning telephone call from Salinger. He initially thought it was his friend Jerry—J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye—so he was caught off guard when Kennedy’s press secretary made the offer for him to write the authorized account of the assassination. At first reluctant to take on such a burden, Manchester turned to his secretary and asked, “How can I say no to Mrs. Kennedy?”

“You can’t,” she replied.

He resigned his post at Wesleyan the same day. Suddenly Manchester found himself “jobless, a middle-aged, highly educated vagrant.”

There was never any question that the proposed book would be published by Harper & Row, which had brought out John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage and Robert Kennedy’s 1960 investigation into union corruption, The Enemy Within. They had both been edited by Evan Welling Thomas III, who had come up with the title for the former book. In his 22 years at Harper & Brothers, later Harper & Row, Thomas had published many prominent politicians and statesmen—mostly Democrats—and John Cheever was among his handful of fiction writers. Tall, slim, aristocratic, Thomas came by his interest in politics honestly as the son of Norman Thomas, the famous American socialist and perennial presidential candidate. There were other Kennedy connections at Harper & Row as well. Cass Canfield, the president of Harper and chairman of the Executive Committee, was a product of Groton, Harvard, and Oxford. Canfield’s son had been briefly married to Jacqueline’s sister, Lee Bouvier, before her marriage to Prince Radziwill. “Cass was, I guess, Jackie’s friend. He was sort of a high-society type,” recalls Thomas’s son, Evan Thomas, now *Newsweek’*s editor-at-large and the author of a well-regarded biography of Robert Kennedy. “I remember my father once saying that Cass was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and enjoyed the taste of it. The family legend is that Profiles in Courage came to Harper through Cass.”

But it was Thomas who went to see John F. Kennedy in the hospital, where he was recovering from major back surgery, to persuade him to write Profiles in Courage, which would win the 1957 Pulitzer Prize. Thomas was impressed by Kennedy’s physical courage and charisma. “In the hospital when I saw him, he was lying on his back, writing on a board. It was impossible not to be charmed by him.” He was charmed, too, by Robert Kennedy when he worked on The Enemy Within. “Daddy started dealing with Bobby,” the younger Thomas recalls. “He liked Bobby—he admired his toughness.”

J.F.K. on a Coast Guard yawl with Jackie, who is reading Portrait of a President, Manchester’s 1962 biography of her husband. From the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library/John Manchester.

That admiration, however, would be tested by the competitive Kennedy clan, who placed a high value on vigor. “My father had multiple sclerosis,” Thomas explains. “He’d gotten M.S. in 1950, but it was in remission mostly. But he had trouble walking, and one story I remember about Bobby is that he would test my father, make him go on a long walk: typical Kennedy. It seems cruel when you think about it, making a guy with M.S. go for a walk, but that’s a little bit the way the Kennedys were—all of life is a test, and you’re always proving your manhood. I don’t think he meant it to be cruel. I remember my father sort of shaking his head, going, ‘Bobby, come on.’”

On February 26, 1964, Manchester flew to Washington to meet with Robert Kennedy, restlessly serving out his term as attorney general, in his impressive, dark-wood-paneled office in the Justice Department. Manchester was shocked by Robert’s appearance. “Much of the time he seemed to be in a trance, staring off into space, his face a study in grief,” he later wrote in Controversy, his collected essays. Also present in the attorney general’s office were Evan Thomas and Manchester’s longtime literary agent, Don Congdon. Edwin O. Guthman, Robert Kennedy’s press secretary, drifted in and out of the meeting. Just before entering Kennedy’s office, Manchester whispered to Congdon, “Don’t say a word. I’m not doing this for money.”

Thomas told the attorney general that no one wanted to “commercialize the assassination,” and he proposed that Harper & Row limit its profit to $35,000 and provide Manchester with an advance of $40,000. The author’s additional royalties would go to the John F. Kennedy Library. “To guarantee my independence, I would accept no money from the Kennedys,” Manchester insisted.

Robert Kennedy had a memo drawn up with 11 points, outlining the roles that Manchester and the Kennedys would play in the commissioning and writing of the book. It stipulated that Harper & Row be the publisher and that the book not be published until five years after the assassination, on November 22, 1968, “unless Mrs. Kennedy designates a prior date.” Most important was item No. 3: “The completed manuscript shall be reviewed by Mrs. John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, and the final text shall not be published unless and until approved by them.” (On this typewritten memo, R.F.K. had scratched out by hand “the final text shall be approved” and wrote instead, “the final text shall not be published unless and until approved” by them.)

“Let Them See What They’ve Done”

One week after the assassination, the newly sworn-in president, Lyndon B. Johnson, convened a blue-ribbon panel, to be headed by Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren, to investigate the events of November 22. The seven-man panel of “the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy” included two United States senators, two influential congressmen (including one future president, Gerald Ford), and Allen W. Dulles, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Manchester, who always maintained that his goals were different from the Warren Commission’s, later wrote in his introduction to The Death of a President, “The Commission was conducting a criminal probe. I was exploring the full sweep of events during what were, in some respects, the most extraordinary hours in the history of our country.” Rather than being seen as a competitor to Johnson’s appointed panel, Manchester was given access to all the “testimony, documents, exhibits and depositions” compiled by the Warren Commission. And he would have one crucial source that the commission did not: Jacqueline Kennedy.

On April 7, 1964, Jacqueline, dressed in yellow Capri pants and a black jersey, closed the sliding doors behind her in her Georgetown home, and Manchester came face-to-face with the president’s widow for their first official meeting. “Mr. Manchester,” she said in her soft, whispery voice. Manchester was struck by her “camellia beauty” and thought she looked much younger than her 34 years. “My first impression—and it never changed—was that I was in the presence of a very great, tragic actress.… There was a weekend in American history when we needed to be united in our sadness,” he later wrote, and Jacqueline Kennedy had “provided us with an unforgettable performance as the nation’s First Lady.”

Jacqueline’s tenure as First Lady had transformed Washington’s social scene. With her style, her youth and beauty, her intelligence (she had been a student at the Sorbonne), she was one of the president’s most formidable assets. Norman Mailer described her as “the most beautiful woman to ever occupy the White House.” She spoke French to de Gaulle during Kennedy’s triumphant visit to Paris (“I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it,” he famously remarked); when she was in Vienna for the president’s summit with Khrushchev, thousands of Viennese shouted “Jak-hee” in the streets until she was led to the window; in London, a cartoon in the Evening Standard depicted her as the Statue of Liberty.

Manchester would meet with her for two five-hour interviews. Arthur Schlesinger had already begun interviewing her for an oral history of the Kennedy administration, to be housed at the John F. Kennedy Library; now Manchester would take over. “One reason we all talked to Manchester was the reason we decided to have the book written in the first place,” Robert Kennedy said at the time. “We just didn’t want to have to go over it again and again and again.”

That burden would fall on Manchester.

Supported by the modest advance—$36,000 after his agent’s commission, paid in three installments—Manchester left his family in Middletown and rented the cheapest suitable rooms he could find in Washington, at 1800 Fourth Street SW, for $150 a month. To save on taxi fare, he walked everywhere. “Throughout that first sweltering spring and summer, I must have averaged at least 10 miles a day,” he recalled. “On a typical morning, I would strike out from the national archives for the White House, double back the length of Pennsylvania Avenue to the Hill, and redouble my tracks again, and spring on to the State Department—total: 62 blocks.”

He walked the 30 or so blocks to N Street from downtown Washington to interview Mrs. Kennedy. He hiked five miles in 94-degree heat, and once showed up at the White House drenched with sweat and spent five minutes drip-drying in front of an air conditioner. He worked from six a.m. to midnight, walking home across the Mall against the lights burning atop the Capitol Building, where a civil-rights filibuster led by Strom Thurmond was in progress. “It was excellent training,” he later wrote, “for the days ahead when I would roam the five-mile motorcade route in Dallas, searching for eye witnesses.”

By the end of August, Manchester had lost 20 pounds, and his clothes hung on him like a scarecrow’s. On one of his visits to Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s home, Hickory Hill, in McLean, Virginia, Ethel suggested that he get a better tailor.

Also to economize, Manchester did most of the grunt work himself. “I typed my own correspondence, sharpened my own pencils, transcribed my own shorthand, and indexed my own notes.” He did all this in a “shabby basement room—B-11—of the National Archives, just down the hall from the snack bar and the men’s room.” He would later be moved to an empty fourth-floor office next to Evelyn Lincoln, who had been Kennedy’s personal secretary for 10 years, and he would eventually relocate his family to a gray frame house in Washington’s Cleveland Park.

“We moved there in September of 1964. I was there for a year of school, at Sidwell Friends,” William Manchester’s only son, John, explains. A musician, composer, and founder of a music-library business, John first met with Vanity Fair in Middletown, in his father’s former office in the Olin Library, a room now devoted to archiving trunks of his father’s manuscripts that have finally been returned from the Kennedy Library.

The den in William Manchester’s Middletown, Connecticut, home, which he used as an office while writing The Death of a President; Manchester in Washington, D.C., 1964. From John Manchester.

One reason Manchester felt he had to work so fast and so hard was that Jim Bishop was forging ahead with his book about the assassination. Bishop continued to ask the former First Lady for interviews, even after she left Georgetown, in 1964, to take up residence in New York in a 15-room apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, which she purchased for $200,000. She finally wrote letters to Bishop in an attempt to stop him in his tracks: “All sorts of different and never ending, conflicting, and sometimes sensational things would be written about President Kennedy’s death. So I hired William Manchester—to protect President Kennedy and the truth … and if I decide the book should never be published—then Mr. Manchester will be reimbursed for his time.” And then, as if thinking aloud, “I suppose I must let it appear—for I have no right to suppress history, which people have a right to know, for reasons of private pain.”

And finally, “I will not talk to you about the events in Dallas, and nobody connected with it will talk to you.”

She sent copies of her letters to Manchester, who was alarmed by what he read. In the first place, he didn’t consider himself to have been “hired” by Mrs. Kennedy, and in the second place, he’d never agreed to be “reimbursed” for his time. But none of that mattered to Jim Bishop. He wrote his book anyway, called The Day Kennedy Was Shot, and his response to Mrs. Kennedy’s letters was simply to grouse—as reported in John Corry’s 1967 The Manchester Affair—“She’s trying to copyright the assassination.”

Manchester held himself to a 100-hour-a-week schedule. “The research was also difficult. Half the people I interviewed displayed deep emotional distress while trying to answer my questions. None of the other sessions were as affecting as those with Jackie.” She couldn’t bear to talk about it in the daylight—the assassination had happened in daylight. So as the sun was going down Manchester would appear at her house in Georgetown, arriving with his Wollensak tape recorder, which he strategically placed out of her sight on a low table, so she wouldn’t worry about it. “Future historians may be puzzled by odd clunking noises on the tapes,” he later wrote. “They were ice cubes. The only way we could get through those long evenings was with the aid of great containers of daiquiris.” Also present on the tapes are the sounds of matches being struck, as both Jacqueline and her interlocutor smoked through the sessions.

A cut-and-paste page from Manchester’s Portrait of a President.From the family of William Manchester/William Manchester Papers, Special Collections & Archives, Wesleyan University. Enlarge this photo.

It was both a help and a horror that she remembered so much. A friend of hers confides, “She has a great visual eye and great recall. She told Manchester everything there was to tell. It was like expunging herself—the wound was still pretty raw.”

One of the things she remembered was how the president, shortly before their trip to Dallas, had for the first time in their marriage asked what she planned to wear: “‘There are going to be all these rich, Republican women at that lunch,’” J.F.K. told her, “‘wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets. And you’ve got to look as marvelous as any of them. Be simple—show these Texans what good taste really is.’ So she tramped in and out of his room, holding dresses in front of her. The outfits finally chosen—weather permitting—were all veterans of her wardrobe: beige and white dresses, blue and yellow suits, and, for Dallas, a pink suit with a navy blue collar and a matching pink pillbox hat.”

She remembered the scene in a Fort Worth, Texas, hotel room where she and Jack prepared to retire the night before arriving in Dallas. Kennedy’s aides had already removed the hotel’s double mattress and replaced it with the special one he always traveled with for his troubled back. The president lay down on the bed, saying he had a stomachache, and asked Jackie not to stay with him, explaining that he had to make a breakfast speech, and that way she could remain in bed the next morning. There was a long embrace. She said good night and went out.

She remembered how, in the motorcade, her husband had asked her to remove her oversize sunglasses because the crowd had come to see her face. It was the last thing he would ever ask of her.

She did not, however, remember seeing the serrated piece of skull ripped from her husband’s head, nor did she remember climbing to the rear of the six-passenger 1961 Lincoln, code-named SS 100 X. At that point she was already in shock, and when Manchester later showed her still frames of dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder’s film, which had caught the entire assassination on 8-mm. Kodachrome, it was “as though she were looking at photographs of another woman.”

But she did remember that she “tenderly wrapped” the president’s head in the lining of Secret Service agent Clint Hill’s suit jacket as they placed the president’s body on a stretcher just outside of Parkland Memorial Hospital, in Dallas. She remembered the backseat wet with blood, and she recalled a “brief moment of panic” when they tried to move his body from the open car. “I’m not going to let him go, Mr. Hill,” she remembered saying. “You know he’s dead. Leave me alone.”

But she also remembered holding out a brief, desperate hope that her husband was still alive. She remembered fighting with a nurse to gain admittance to the trauma room at Parkland Hospital. When Rear Admiral George Burkley, one of Kennedy’s physicians, offered her a sedative, she remembered, she told him, “I want to be in there when he dies.” She remembered the expression on her husband’s face in death, describing it as a look of “compassion.” Manchester, who had seen men die on Okinawa, and thought he was made of strong stuff, found it increasingly difficult, as he listened, to maintain his composure.

She remembered asking one of the surgeons, Dr. Kemp Clark, who had worked fruitlessly over the president’s inert body, if she could see her husband in his coffin before it was closed. When he said no, Mrs. Kennedy remembered, she said, “Do you think seeing the coffin can upset me, doctor? … His blood is all over me. How can I see anything worse than I’ve seen?”

She remembered trying to remove her left glove so she could place her wedding ring in the coffin, on her husband’s finger, and how she had fumbled with the snap on her glove, and how she had held out her wrist to police sergeant Robert Dugger, who undid the snap and peeled the glove from her hand.

She remembered being asked by the president’s physician on board Air Force One if she wanted to change out of her blood-smeared suit into a pristine white dress that had been laid out on the presidential bed for her. “No,” she vehemently told him. “Let them see what they’ve done.”

Death and Texas

Eventually, Manchester had to go to Dallas. Once there, he walked everywhere, including the entire five-mile motorcade route, from Love Field onto Main and then Houston and Elm Streets, past the Texas School Book Depository Building, searching for spectators and, in Dealey Plaza, possible snipers’ nests.

He discovered deep political enmities that had simmered at the time of the assassination, not just against the Kennedys but among the Democrats as well. Indeed, that’s what had compelled Kennedy’s trip to Dallas in the first place: John B. Connally, the conservative Democratic governor, was at war with the more liberal Democratic senator Ralph W. Yarborough. Even a formidable Texas politician like Vice President Johnson couldn’t put out the oil fire the two men had ignited. Kennedy didn’t want to lose the state in the upcoming ‘64 election, so he’d agreed to go to Dallas in an attempt to heal the rift.

Manchester also discovered that Dallas “had become the Mecca for medicine-show evangelists … the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry Societies, and the headquarters of [ultra-conservative oil billionaire] H. L. Hunt and his activities.”

“In that third year of the Kennedy presidency,” Manchester wrote, “a kind of fever lay over Dallas country. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed, ‘Impeach Earl Warren.’ Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas.…Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; corporate junior executives were required to attend radical seminars.” A retired major general ran the American flag upside down, deriding it as “the Democrat flag.” A wanted poster with J.F.K.’s face on it was circulated, announcing “this man is Wanted” for—among other things—“turning the sovereignty of the US over to the Communist controlled United Nations” and appointing “anti-Christians … aliens and known Communists” to federal offices. And a full-page advertisement had appeared the day of the assassination in The Dallas Morning News accusing Kennedy of making a secret deal with the Communist Party; when it was shown to the president, he was appalled. He turned to Jacqueline, who was visibly upset, and said, “Oh, you know, we’re heading into nut country today.”

Manchester discovered that in a wealthy Dallas suburb, when told that President Kennedy had been murdered in their city, the students in a fourth-grade class burst into applause. For Manchester, who revered Kennedy, such responses, encountered throughout Dallas, were deeply offensive and would influence the book he was about to write.

Manchester also learned that in 1963 there had been 110 murders in Dallas—“Big D”—in what he described as the city’s “dark streak of violence.” “Texas led the United States in homicide, and Big D led Texas,” he wrote. He would come to believe that Dallas’s charged political climate had been a factor in the assassination, helping to further unhinge the already unstable Lee Harvey Oswald.

He also discovered that Kennedy had been warned not to make the trip. “Evangelist Billy Graham had attempted to reach Kennedy … about his own foreboding. The Dallas mood was no secret,” he wrote. And Senator William Fulbright, the liberal senator from Arkansas, had pleaded with Kennedy: “Dallas is a very dangerous place. I wouldn’t go there. Don’t you go.” Manchester learned that the last words Kennedy probably heard were spoken by Nellie Connally, the governor’s wife. Delighted by the enthusiastic crowds along the motorcade route, she turned around in her seat and said, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.” And then the first shot rang out.

Over the two years of his research, Manchester interviewed l,000 people. “It was exhaustive, and exhausting,” his son, John, says. In addition to tape-recording his interviews, he took copious notes in tiny, meticulous handwriting. Only two people refused to see him: President Johnson, who would later give him written answers through members of his staff, and Marina Oswald, the assassin’s Russian widow. But he did spend time with Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, who made a powerful impression on him. She told the writer that her son, far from being an assassin, was in reality a secret agent of the government.

Unknown to Manchester when he began his research, shortly before Lee Harvey Oswald left Louisiana for Dallas in July of 1963, Oswald made one of his frequent visits to the Napoleon branch of the New Orleans Public Library. Incredibly, he checked out Manchester’s admiring study of John F. Kennedy, Portrait of a President. Like many young couples, Oswald and Marina were obsessed with the Kennedys. Priscilla Johnson McMillan, in her fascinating 1977 account of the Oswalds, Marina and Lee, reports that Marina’s schoolgirl crush on the chestnut-haired president—her mooning over magazine photographs of Kennedy strolling on the beach in his khaki pants, her insisting that Oswald translate for her any articles about the Kennedys—was becoming a sore point in their already troubled marriage. “He is very attractive,” Marina Oswald told her husband. “I can’t say what he is as president, but I mean, as a man.” McMillan writes, “It got so that she would flip through the pages of every magazine she could lay her hands on asking, ‘Where’s Kennedy? Where’s Kennedy?’”

Manchester flew to Dallas from Fort Worth, after examining the hotel room where the Kennedys had spent their last night together. He stood in the sixth-floor-window sniper’s nest and looked out onto Dealey Plaza, sighting an imaginary rifle down Elm Street. He visited Parkland Hospital. He discovered that the Dallas mortician, Vernon Oneal, had been worried about bloodstains on the green satin interior of the Elgin Britannia casket, so he wrapped six rubber bags around the president’s head. Manchester visited Oswald’s rooming house, at 1026 North Beckley, and even sat in the seat that Oswald had occupied when he was finally arrested in the Texas Theatre while War Is Hell flickered on the screen. He read a full year’s back issues of The Dallas Morning News. He watched the Zapruder film close to 100 times—the slow, silent procession; the smiling figures in the car; Jackie in her pink suit; the president slumping in his seat, then reeling backward; the sudden pink mist; Jackie crawling over the back of the seat; the car disappearing into the shadow of an overpass.

Ten months after beginning their investigation of the tragedy, the Warren Commission found no evidence of any connection between the assassination and “the city’s general atmosphere of hate.” Interestingly, the chief justice asked Manchester to read the first draft of the commission’s report and—surprisingly—to approve its findings on behalf of the Kennedys. Though he would eventually come to share its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had been the sole gunman in the assassination, Manchester refused to speak for the family. After all, he was not overly impressed by the men on the commission, especially as much of their research fell to junior staff. (“I have more investigative experience than any of them,” he felt.) And Robert Kennedy remained skeptical of their findings for the rest of his life, which would be ended by another assassin’s bullet five years later.

John remembers his father, back in Middletown, “working away, in the back room, upstairs at the house, or at his office” in the Olin Library. And he was clearly working alone. Though he was invited to Hickory Hill and to the Kennedy-family compound, in Hyannis Port, for occasional swims and family dinners, Manchester increasingly found himself fobbed off on Bobby’s and Jackie’s secretaries. He had become, for them, the living reminder of the assassination and all its horror.

After Manchester finally interviewed Robert Kennedy at his apartment in United Nations Plaza, the two men went to La Caravelle, a favorite restaurant of the Kennedys in Manhattan. Over drinks, Manchester offered to bring the book out three years earlier than planned, pointing out that 1968 was an election year, and that publishing the book then might look like a cynical plea for sympathy should Bobby decide to seek national office. Evan Thomas had already approached Bobby about trying to pre-empt Jim Bishop’s book. Kennedy instantly agreed, and he promised to read the manuscript as soon as it was completed.

Manchester had lobbied for the earlier publication date, but it added pressure to an already grueling schedule. He continued to write 14 or 15 hours a day, seven days a week. Schlesinger, who had become a friend, feared Manchester might be on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

John remembers, “My father was the man who couldn’t stop grieving. He had to live with the assassination every day.” He was becoming unhinged. Once, while working on a homework assignment, 15-year-old John asked his father what day it was. Manchester replied without thinking, “November 22.” On another occasion, he acted strangely during an interview with a friend of Jacqueline’s. Manchester had gotten up to look out the window, convinced that he saw something moving in the bushes. “I’ve been followed ever since I began this book,” he said.

A photograph of Jackie, signed to Manchester. From John Manchester.

During the great northeastern power failure of November 1965, Manchester called Schlesinger and told him it was “a sign.… It was just the way it had been in Saigon before the fall of Dien Bien Phu,” according to John Corry. “He had been there, and he knew.”

By the second anniversary of the assassination, Manchester began to crack. “I had no appetite—for food, for beauty, for life. I slept fitfully; when I did drift off, I dreamt of Dallas. I was gripping my Esterbrook [fountain pen] so hard that my thumb began to bleed under the nail. It became infected … marring the manuscript pages with blood.” He stopped driving because he didn’t trust his reflexes. Finally, on November 22, 1965, he found himself writing the sentence “Oswald, surrounded by over 70 policemen, was murdered in the basement of the Dallas jail,” when his hand stopped moving. He couldn’t go on. “This is Camus,” he would eventually write. “This is the theatre of the absurd.”

Four days later, he was admitted to a Portland, Connecticut, hospital, suffering from nervous exhaustion, which gave rise to rampant rumors in Washington—that he had fallen into catatonic schizophrenia, that he had fallen in love with Jacqueline Kennedy, that he had fallen completely apart. Manchester’s doctor even received an anonymous phone call saying that he had died in Mexico City. Hearing the rumor, Robert Kennedy aide John Seigenthaler exclaimed, “We’ve killed him!” But after 12 days, Manchester asked for his typewriter and his files to be brought to him, and he finished the book in the hospital, where he remained for eight more weeks.

Read It and Weep

The final manuscript, which Manchester had titled The Death of Lancer (Kennedy’s Secret Service code name), was l,201 pages—380,000 words. He wrote to Bobby Kennedy upon its completion, “When I awoke this morning I felt as though I had emerged from a long, dark tunnel.” He made four copies and packed them into a suitcase, which weighed 77 pounds, and on March25, 1966, he boarded a Trailways bus for New York and hand-delivered the first copy to Evan Thomas at Harper & Row. He dropped another copy off with Don Congdon, and then, with Thomas at his side, the remaining copies were delivered to Robert Kennedy’s Manhattan office. Angie Novello, Robert’s secretary, and Pam Turnure, Jacqueline’s private secretary, brought Manchester to the Kennedy suite at the Carlyle, No. 18E, where they toasted the completion of the book.

It was finally a glorious spring for William Manchester. The reactions of his first readers were ecstatic. Back home in Connecticut, he got a phone call from Evan Thomas: “This is the finest book I’ve read in 20 years here,” his editor told him. “I couldn’t stop crying, but I couldn’t stop reading.” Cass Canfield wrote to Manchester, “A work of unusual distinction and great power. It will be in demand long after you and I have disappeared from the scene.” Schlesinger wrote in a six-page memorandum, which he sent to Robert Kennedy, Evan Thomas, and Manchester, “I think that this is a remarkable and potentially a great book. The research, the feeling, the narrative power, the evocation of personality and atmosphere, much of the writing—all are superb.”

That was the good news. The bad news, as his editor informed him, was that neither Jacqueline nor Robert would read the manuscript. It would only open up painful memories, Robert had explained, so he delegated his and his sister-in-law’s right of approval to two trusted Kennedy aides, Ed Guthman and John Seigenthaler. Richard Goodwin, the poetry-loving speechwriter and adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, would also weigh in.

Manchester thought he was finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but it turned out it was the light of an oncoming train.

Guthman, Robert Kennedy’s press secretary, had left the Justice Department and was now national editor at the Los Angeles Times. Seigenthaler, “the blond, tough editor of The Tennessean,” was Robert Kennedy’s closest friend. And Dick Goodwin, the rumpled, summa cum laude graduate of Tufts and Harvard Law School, had worked in the Justice Department as an investigator into the television quiz-show scandals of the 1950s. After the president’s death, Goodwin continued as a speechwriter for President Johnson, but Senator Kennedy also came to rely upon him. Coincidentally, Goodwin and Manchester were neighbors at the time in Middletown, as Goodwin had accepted a two-year fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan.

Thomas worked with Guthman and Seigenthaler, who provided him with long memos about their concerns. Their main objection, which Thomas shared, was Manchester’s unflattering depiction of Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson, Thomas felt, was portrayed as a rawboned boor, too eager to take over on Air Force One the day of the assassination. If Bobby sought the nomination from his party in the 1968 election, the book’s less than flattering portrayal of Johnson would look opportunistic. On May 16, 1966, after reading the manuscript for a third time, Thomas wrote to the two Kennedy friends that he didn’t want Robert Kennedy to be hurt by association with Manchester’s book, which he found, “in part, gratuitously and tastelessly insulting to Johnson.” He suggested that Manchester had become “so deeply involved in this tragic narrative that he could not resist turning it into a magic fairy tale”—Jack the Lancer, “all pure Camelot,” versus “the Texans in their polka dot dresses and bow ties.”

Most troubling to the early readers was “the deer-hunting incident”—a scene described by Jacqueline that opened the original manuscript. On a visit to the Johnson ranch, along the Pedernales River, eight days after the election, Johnson took the president-elect deer-hunting, initiating him into the blood sport. “At 6 a.m. they turned out by the ranch house, Johnson in weather beaten cowboy clothes, Kennedy in a checked sports jacket and slacks. They left in Johnson’s white Cadillac, zooming and jouncing across the fields, and Kennedy was forced to shoot his deer.… To Kennedy,” Manchester wrote, “shooting tame game was not sport, and he had tried to bow out gracefully.” The scene underscored the implication that Texas and its culture of violence were factors in the assassination. Manchester, when asked to delete the scene, refused to do so, but he did plow it further back into the narrative, which diminished its power. Still, the implication remained that “a Texas murder had made a Texan President,” in the words of Jay Epstein, who would later write Inquest, about the Kennedy assassination.

Dick Goodwin joined the jury, poring over the manuscript, which he praised as “a masterful achievement.” He advocated only three changes: to begin with, a new title. It was Goodwin who suggested the elegant The Death of a President. He also suggested excising a quote by Mrs. Kennedy and shortening the ending of the book by five pages, all of which Manchester agreed to do.

The $665,000 Question

Thomas felt that the book was “overwrought,” and he worried about his author’s reaction to their edits. There were already concerns about his emotional state. Manchester was, for the most part, left out of the editorial process—Kennedy’s aides conveyed their responses only to Thomas and to junior editors at Harper & Row. Not only that, Manchester was running out of money and needed the final third of the publisher’s advance, which would be released only when Robert, representing the Kennedys, approved the book for publication. Thomas told Seigenthaler that Manchester, already a sensitive man, was almost at the breaking point, and he needed to hear something—anything—from the Kennedys. That’s when Robert finally sent him a telegram, on July 29, 1966: while i have not read william manchester’s account of the death of president kennedy … members of the kennedy family will place no obstacle in the way of publication of his work.

Reassured by Kennedy’s words of support, Evan Thomas now felt he could schedule the book’s publication for January 1967, though the edits were still under way.

Don Congdon sent copies of the manuscript to six magazines for possible serialization: Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and Look. Look had expressed interest two and a half years earlier, when the book was announced. Life and Look quickly entered into a bidding war. Look won out, coming in with a final bid of $665,000 for world rights, the largest sum ever paid for serialization at the time. When Manchester called Senator Kennedy in Hyannis Port to tell him the news, he responded, “Great … Look has been so nice to the family and Henry Luce has been such a bastard.” It was a staggering amount of money in 1967, and it would all go to Manchester. John remembered that his father “was flabbergasted. It was a lot of money back then. It was like five million dollars today.”

The Manchester-Kennedy battle makes headlines in the New York Post.Courtesy of Evan Thomas Jr.

The record bid delighted the author, astounded his agent, and impressed the senator. But there was one person who did not share their joy—Jacqueline Kennedy.

She had vacationed in Hawaii in June of 1966 and had returned to Hyannis Port to celebrate her 37th birthday, on July 28, at a gala hosted by banker Paul Mellon, with a guest list awash in money, influence, and talent: the Jock Whitneys arrived by yacht; the William Paleys and Averell Harrimans mixed with Broadway set designer Oliver Smith, director Mike Nichols, and Kenneth, Jackie’s hairdresser and confidant. She had come into her own in the three years after the president’s death, trading her Miss Porter’s boarding-school propriety for much-commented-upon miniskirts. “Fully emerged from mourning,” Manchester later wrote, “she was photographed dancing, skiing, riding in a New Jersey hunt, cruising along the Dalmatian coast, greeting European nobility, and visiting Acapulco, the West Indies, and Spain.” Women’s Wear Daily gushed that she had become “one of the realgirls—honest, natural, open, de-contrived, de-kooked, delicious, subtle, feminine, young, modern, in love with life, knows how to have fun.”

She had seemed content to let her brother-in-law manage the final approval and publication of The Death of a President, until July 31, when Senator Kennedy told her about the Look offer. She was appalled. She felt that the huge serialization fee by rights should go directly to the Kennedy Library and not to Manchester.

“I think that Jackie Kennedy looked at my father,” John Manchester recalls, “as not being in the same social class as her, and it was part of her notion that he could be pushed around … that he was malleable. When it looked like he was going to get wealthy as a result of all this, I think she was upset.”

Jacqueline got Robert to complain to Evan Thomas that “the author was making too much profit from magazine rights,” and to remind him, “Mrs. Kennedy and I must give permission for publication of the book that has not been given.” He seemed to have forgotten about his earlier telegram to Manchester, telling him he would put no obstacle in the way of publication.

A Newsday headline about Look magazine’s serialization of the book. Courtesy of Evan Thomas Jr.

Mrs. Kennedy still had no intention of reading the manuscript, but her personal secretary, Pam Turnure, read every word, and was apparently alarmed about the many personal revelations—emotional responses, reminiscences, intimate details that had been given to the author during his 10 hours of taped interviews with Jacqueline. Turnure objected to Manchester’s including descriptions of the president wandering around in his underwear before bedtime, and a list of the contents of Mrs. Kennedy’s purse the morning after the assassination, because it contained something Jacqueline had successfully hidden from the public throughout her thousand days as First Lady: her cigarettes. Turnure gave Manchester copious notes as to what she, speaking for Mrs. Kennedy, wanted deleted from the book, including many references to the children, the contents of a letter written by Caroline and placed in her father’s coffin, and Jackie’s description of the night she spent with Kennedy before Dallas. Jackie had unburdened herself to Manchester, had confided her deepest memories of the tragic event and its aftermath, but now, faced with their disclosure in a glossy magazine for all the world to see, she panicked. It was, she would later say, “tasteless” to include those private memories, admitting to Manchester that she thought his book “would be bound in black and put away on dark library shelves”—she wasn’t prepared for what was about to happen. “Jackie was very vulnerable,” Seigenthaler recalls. “Bill was an excellent journalist, but I had the feeling that in some ways he had taken advantage of her vulnerability.”

As far as Manchester was concerned, The Death of a President had already been approved by Robert Kennedy, who was now bending over backward to please his sister-in-law. It particularly rankled Manchester that he now had to deal with the passages Pam Turnure wanted deleted. He reminded his editor that she “was not qualified to edit historical work” and that they had agreed, once Bobby gave his approval, that “no suggestion from Pam Turnure was to be even considered.”

In August, Thomas received a shocking telegram from Robert Kennedy, backpedaling on the entire project: “I feel the book on President Kennedy’s death should be neither published nor serialized.… It just seems to me that rather than struggling with this any longer we should take our chances with Jim Bishop.” Jim Bishop!

Jackie’s Last Stand

On August 12, in the face of an airline strike, Manchester and Thomas chartered a plane to Washington to attend a meeting at Kennedy’s Senate office. Kennedy “paced tigerlike,” taking up Jackie’s cause by inveighing against the serialization in Look. Manchester—trying to keep his voice down—reminded Robert that he’d already signed a contract with Gardner “Mike” Cowles Jr., founder and publisher of Look magazine. “You have a contract with me, too,” Kennedy snapped. Manchester reminded Kennedy that he wasn’t planning to get rich on the deal, nor was Harper & Row, and that he’d been through a great deal over the past two years. In fact, he was currently under a doctor’s care.

“Do you think you’ve suffered more than Jackie and me?” Kennedy cried out in anguish. He asked that the serialization be shredded so that it could never come out, and Manchester refused. Furious, Kennedy left the room. “There’s something wrong,” Manchester said to his editor. “This is not the brother of the man I knew.”

When Kennedy returned, he’d apparently had a change of heart. He took Thomas aside, assuring him that he could go ahead with the publication of the book, and not to worry about the serialization. After all, this was really Jackie’s fight, and he had taken up her interests as far as he could.

Jackie was not pleased. She summoned Mike Cowles and his attorney, John F. Harding, to Hyannis Port, where she and her lawyer Simon Rifkind met with the Look publisher. Rifkind, a former federal judge, was a senior partner at the powerful law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which had had close ties to the Kennedy administration. Jackie sent the family plane, Caroline, to fly the two men to the Kennedy compound. Once there, she alternately cajoled, charmed, shed tears, and stalked off in anger. She even offered Cowles a million dollars to kill the serialization. Cowles refused, but he did offer to reduce the seven installments to four, and to postpone publication from November to January of 1967, to avoid what had become, for Jacqueline, the cruelest month. Next she turned her attention to Manchester.

In September, Manchester and Dick Goodwin flew to Hyannis Port, where Jackie met them at the airstrip in a green miniskirt. She was determined to win Manchester over, first by dazzling him with her hospitality and athleticism—she water-skied and swam with him in the ocean, leaving the ex-Marine gasping for breath. Back at the compound, she pressed her case against the Look serialization, alternating between anger and tears. “It’s us against them,” she said in her whispery, intimate voice. “Anyone who is against me will look like a rat,” she added, “unless I run off with Eddie Fisher.” She tried a charm offensive, recalling her home telephone number as a child (“Rhinelander4-6167”) and confiding how incredulous she was that her picture appeared so often on the covers of movie magazines. When that didn’t work, she insisted her taped interviews had been made exclusively for the Kennedy Library and that Manchester had had no right to use them. She reminded him that she had “poured out her soul as if he were a psychiatrist.” She was deeply critical of all books about her husband, even Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Through tears, she told Manchester that she was going to fight Look, and fight him if she had to, and she was going to win.

Jackie with Kennedy adviser Richard Goodwin and her lawyer, Simon Rifkind, on the way to *Look’*s offices, December 1966. By Jack Manning/New York Times/Redux.

By November 15, Manchester was exhausted and run-down and had caught a cold he just could not shake. He decided to take his wife, Judy, on a much-needed vacation to London aboard the Queen Mary, and prior to embarking they spent the night in New York at a hotel suite maintained by Look magazine. To avoid further publicity, he checked into the Berkshire Hotel under his agent’s name. To his dismay, waiting for him in the lobby was Evan Thomas, with a clutch of further cuts requested by Seigenthaler and Pam Turnure. The beleaguered author refused, having already planned to attend a cocktail party in his honor, and an Ella Fitzgerald concert later that night. Nonetheless, when the evening was over, Manchester sat down in his hotel room at midnight and began, once again, to review the manuscript. He worked throughout the night, planning to deliver his revisions to Thomas the next day at seven a.m. in the hotel dining room.

But when he met his editor that morning, also waiting for him were Dick Goodwin and Kennedy aide Burke Marshall, with still more editing demands. Goodwin wanted assurances that all of Jackie’s deletions would be made. Manchester couldn’t believe it. He charged the two men with “trespassing beyond the borders of decency,” and he fled to his hotel suite, with Evan Thomas trailing him. In the elevator, Manchester accused his editor of bushwhacking him. No one was supposed to have known where he was staying. On the way up to the suite, Thomas blurted out, “I didn’t betray you.”

In the hotel suite’s living room, Thomas was trying to persuade Manchester that he had not set him up, when they heard a pounding on the door and a voice shouting, “Bill, are you there? Bill, I know you’re in there!”

It was Robert Kennedy.

Thomas turned to Manchester and said, “You have to let him in.” Manchester replied, “The hell I do. I didn’t invite him, and I have nothing to say to him. Do you really think a former Attorney General of the United States is going to break down a door?”

Without speaking to Kennedy, and after summoning Don Congdon, Manchester was hustled onto the deck of the Queen Mary. His cold worsened, and by the time he and his wife returned—smuggled off the ship to avoid the press—he had full-blown pneumonia.

Evan Thomas had tried valiantly to negotiate from the middle, hoping to preserve his friendship with the Kennedys, his loyalty to his author, and his desire to publish The Death of a President. But working with Bobby was not easy. “My memory is that he was loyal as all hell to Jackie,” Thomas’s son says. As the struggle between the warring factions continued, Jackie summoned Thomas and Cass Canfield to a l0 p.m. meeting at her Fifth Avenue apartment. “Last night,” Thomas wrote in a letter—curiously, dated November 22, 1966—“Mrs. Kennedy charged me with responsibility for the Look first serialization … and various other acts of irresponsibility. The width and depth of her charges were so all encompassing that I was, for a change, speechless.” Thomas’s son describes a chilling moment: “As they’re leaving, Jackie is hugging Cass—they were old buddies and social equals—and she leans over Cass’s shoulder and whispers to my father, ‘I’m going to ruin you.’”

So, in the eleventh hour, after Manchester had already made changes in response to Guthman, Seigenthaler, Thomas, Goodwin, and even Turnure, Jacqueline filed an injunction in New York against Manchester, Harper & Row, and Cowles Communications, Inc., which owned Look, claiming that “because she supplied Manchester with certain information to be used in his book and because she assisted him in obtaining interviews with others from whom he gained information to be used in the book, she therefore has an absolute right to decide what may and what may not appear therein.”

Manchester was devastated. He dug in his heels, refusing to renege on his contract with Look or to incorporate any further changes in the text. “There’s a quote,” John recalls, “in which my father says, ‘I’ll die for this book.’”

The moment Jackie filed her injunction, all hell broke loose. The New York Post headlines shouted, “bitter new row on book—Manchester vs. RFK, Jackie—Words Fly.” The leading columnists of the day, including James Reston, Drew Pearson, Max Lerner, Jimmy Breslin, and Murray Kempton, weighed in, and Manchester even appeared on Meet the Press to tell his side of the story.

Reporters and photographers showed up in Middletown, waiting outside the Manchesters’ 176-year-old farmhouse, which was bathed in television lights; the journalists roamed through the town, buttonholing Manchester’s neighbors and following his children home from school. Once, a Middletown policeman walked into the house, announcing he’d “just been hired as a stringer for the New York Daily News.” The telephone rang constantly; Roger Mudd, the prominent CBS correspondent, called with a camera crew in tow from the Merritt Parkway. John Manchester recalls coming home for Christmas vacation from prep school: “My mother was annoyed by all the TV trucks outside of our house, and my father was hiding. So I went to the door. I stood there and smiled and talked a lot and didn’t tell them anything they wanted to know. I kind of enjoyed the attention, but, for my parents, it was very bad.” Because of the giant headache the Kennedys were causing Manchester, Bayer Aspirin offered him $35,000 to endorse its product. (He turned down the offer.)

For the first time, Jacqueline Kennedy’s popularity declined in national polls. The World Journal Tribune and the New York Post ran the results of a Gallup poll and a Harris poll showing, respectively, that “44 percent of the people think the dispute has hurt her public image,” and “33 percent ‘think less’ of Mrs. Kennedy.” Senator Kennedy also suffered in the polls, threatening his political career. “Bobby got fed up with Jackie,” Evan Thomas recalls. “‘Why am I being dragged into this?’ It hurt him politically, and that never goes down well.”

Roll the Presses

On January 16, 1967, just a few hours before Robert Kennedy was to appear as the first witness in Mrs. Kennedy’s lawsuit, she agreed to settle out of court. Perhaps she feared that a trial would hurt her brother-in-law’s political fortunes. Manchester had noticed that relations between them had become strained. (Having drinks with Arthur Schlesinger at P.J. Clarke’s not long after the settlement, Bobby Kennedy confided that “he was sorry that he’d ever become involved in the whole thing,” recalled Schlesinger.) Ultimately, Manchester agreed to cut 1,600 words out of the Look serialization and 7 pages out of the book’s 654 pages of text—changes he later deemed “harmless.” jackie settles was front-page news in the New York Post; jacqueline kennedy’s victory, announced *Newsweek.*The serialization went forward.

A few hours after *Look’*s first installment hit the stands, 4,000 copies were sold in Times Square alone. United Airlines discovered that all of its l,800 copies were stolen from their binders by airline passengers. Copies were pirated and sold on the black market as far away as Mexico City. Interest was so high that 400,000 advance copies of The Death of a President were ordered before its publication, and The New York Times predicted that it would become “one of the great best-sellers in book publishing history.”

Certain revelations in the four installments took the public by surprise: Manchester questioned why two middle-aged Secret Service agents with “slowing reflexes” were assigned to President Kennedy, and wondered why they were not routinely tested; the driver of the limousine was 54, and the agent sitting beside the driver was 48. “They were in a position,” Manchester wrote, “to take evasive action after the first shot, but for five terrible seconds they were immobilized.” Readers also learned how Mrs. Kennedy “struggled with a nurse who tried to bar her from the operating room.” And how the president, after being in a crowd the night before their arrival in Dallas, had said to her, “Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase.”

Six hundred thousand copies of The Death of a President sold out within two months, and by the summer of 1967 it had sold more than a million copies. The reviews were full of guarded praise, mostly for Manchester’s exhaustive assemblage of detail. But Alistair Cooke, writing in the World Journal Tribune’s Book Week, noted that “the dispute is already more famous than the book,” and he accused Manchester of “deliberately shoveling at us a mountain of minutiae.” Gore Vidal wrote that “the crowded, overwritten narrative holds,” yet Manchester is “too haughty in his dismissal of the plot-theory.” In two New York Times reviews, the anti-Johnson bias was discounted, but both reviewers worried over the “peculiar emotional insistence that … infuses this book.” In the late 1960s, it seems, reviewers wanted their history straight up, no chaser. But the final consensus: “It was worth the effort; it may even have been worth the pain,” according to Tom Wicker’s review in The New York Times.

When the History Books Are Written

The Death of a President and its serialization had taken their toll on everyone. Evan Thomas knew that Manchester had felt betrayed by him, and he himself felt that he had not lived up to his own ideal of standing by his author. His M.S., which had been in remission for so long, reappeared, possibly brought on by the incredible stress of so public a battle. “The long remission was ending,” his son recalls. “He lived until 1998, and he started having mental symptoms as early as 1973. That’s a pretty long, slow decline.”

Thomas left Harper & Row in 1968, barely a year after The Death of a President was published, and he spent the rest of his career at W.W. Norton. He and Manchester remained somewhat estranged, although Thomas kept a Christmas card from Manchester which read simply, “Seasons Greetings. And thanks for everything. Remember, the Marine Corps never taught me how to surrender. Bill.” In the end, Thomas was proud of having published Manchester’s book, his son believes.

Manchester returned to Middletown and would write eight more books, including his long-delayed history of the Krupp family (The Arms of Krupp 1587–1968); a collection of essays called—not surprisingly—Controversy; his greatly admired and highly influential history of America from 1932 to 1972, titled The Glory and the Dream; and American Caesar, his biography of General Douglas MacArthur, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Back in his familiar Olin Library office, overlooking Wesleyan’s football field, he also completed two volumes of a life of Winston Churchill, but after two strokes he found he no longer had the stamina to continue. Another writer, Paul Reid, is completing the third and final volume.

Despite his power struggle with the Kennedys, Manchester eventually mended fences with Robert and even campaigned for him during his 1968 bid for the presidential nomination.

Manchester never changed his mind about the Warren Commission, though he felt its investigation had been less than thorough.

In the end I concluded that [the Warren] report was correct on the two main issues. Oswald was the killer, and he had acted alone.… Those who desperately want to believe that President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy have my sympathy. I share their yearning … if you put the murdered President of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something.

As Manchester pointed out to conspiracy theorists, great crimes are often the result of petty, almost banal motives. Jacqueline Kennedy came to a similar conclusion: that her husband had not died for a great cause but for a private, pathetic grievance of which he was totally unaware.

The taped interviews Jacqueline had made with Manchester were delivered to the Kennedy Library and are kept under seal, not to be made public until 2067—l00 years after publication of The Death of a President. By 1970, royalties for Manchester’s book had reached $1,057,347.64, all donated to the library. Manchester later complained that he was one of the library’s biggest single donors, but his book and research materials were kept away from the public and unavailable to scholars.

By virtue of their original agreement with Harper & Row, the Kennedys continue to control the fate of The Death of a President. Even now, after William Manchester’s original manuscript has come home to Wesleyan, where it is held under a kind of house arrest—heavily censored, and subject to extremely restricted use—the Kennedy family has allowed the book to go out of print, according to John Manchester. Sitting in the bar at the Four Seasons Hotel in sight of Boston Common, where his father had first met Kennedy, when both men were newly home from the war, he says, “The Death of a President helped build that library, but if you go there today, there’s no mention of it or him anywhere. He was written out of their history.”

Finally, not long after the Sturm und Drang, Mrs. Kennedy sat in a favorite chair in her Fifth Avenue apartment and began to read The Death of a President. She stayed up all night reading. Before she knew it, daylight was in the room. She turned the last page over and said only one word: “Fascinating.”